Another academic eyeing up a position in a Reform cabinet?

Yarvin is one of world’s most influential racists right now. Yet, here we are.

Also, this may be testament to how many of the r/w commentariat read Goodwin’s substack. He’s even used AI to create a visual shorthand. It’s such an intellectually incestuous community. Many examples of this - ‘luxury beliefs’, ‘hurty words’, etc., etc.

Claims of the novelty of AI and its potential for innovation in education always make me wince a bit because really it continues a bunch of long-running tendencies in the sector. It’s an *intensifier* rather than an innovation. Some examples… www.forbes.com/councils/for...

The trees to left were planted to mark the Act of Union. Only a few have survived the weather over the years. Legend has it that when the last tree falls the Union will disintegrate.

Is this what Angus mac Fergus saw in AD 832 before his battle with Athelstan?

"Oxford becomes first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all staff and students" - imagining a lot of staff there pretty upset about, but also it says much about OpenAI's education strategy that it's targeted Oxford as its first institutional capture in the UK www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

Why does anyone expect anything other than staggering hypocrisy from anti-woke, anti-cancel culture campaigners like Young? They campaigned against what they said was an anti-democratic, unaccountable, self aggrandising, establishment gravy train then all took permanent seats in the House of Lords.

It takes an extraordinary mind to criticise Jean Monnet professors for "propagandising" when you're taking money from an institution set up with the specific goal of running propaganda for an electoral autocracy.

Depressing. I remember all the Vote Leave signs next to all the EU funded regeneration signs in the Valleys. Now there’s no money going in at all, except for soul eating out of town shopping parks, and money coming out for drugs, lots of drugs.

Couldn’t resist/avoid contrarian takes on Robinson march. All basically boiled down to this. I went as an ‘observer’ only (implying it’s not their cup of tea for some reason). Everyone I met was really nice. I asked them if they were racist & they said no.

We live in a society that assumes adults know what they’re doing. If you turn-up at a march organised by the UK’s most prominent far-right activist, why does anyone need to say actually you were really there to protest the effects of neoliberalism as if you didn’t understand or had no alternative?

Tempted to read the many Blue Laboury contrarian commentariat accounts telling their audience that yesterday was a really a demo against neoliberal globalisation, but have better things to do.

@k8ebrown.bsky.social you did an excellent job on BBC News cutting through the bs with some much needed academic analysis @aurelmondon.bsky.social got a mention too

Must stay off social media, or indeed all media because it’s increasingly recycling hateful bullshit from X (such as pro trans-bullets) to maintain sanity.

Many anti woke entrepreneurs who opposed cancel culture & maintained that concept of consequential discourse was part of plot inspired by Foucault to destroy Western civilisation are now calling for the incoming Ox Uni pres. to be expelled, & blaming Kirk’s murder on the collective left’s language.

Brand was also recently baptised into Paul Marshall’s church (GBNews’s patron). It’s a tight community that will forgive anything if it’s committed by one of their own.

Got to admire the way the Spiked crew set themselves up as brave enemies of antisemitism only to use a traditional antisemitic trope to claim Zac Polanski’s influence is explained by mesmerism.

Yet nothing will be done. Racism and enshittifcation are now indivisible.

What’s the opposite of joined-up thinking? The government’s abject failure to address these issues will produce more decrepit towns turning to Reform and a much more elitist HE system with fewer places and less choice for w/c students, and maybe more young Reform voters.

There never could be any evidence. There is no biological mechanism by which these vaccines can cause cancer. Populism is the political mobilisation of ignorance to exploit disaffection.

So someone can earn over the national average salary simply by being racist on X, and this is acceptable somehow.

Why is the debunking of anti-vax pseudoscience reduced to ‘there’s no evidence’ (as if some may emerge in the future)? There is no biological mechanism by which these vaccines can cause cancer. They don’t enter cell nuclei. This is GCSE Biology.

Can’t be alone in wanting some reassurance that Reform will be nowhere power. So many of our institutions such as universities, the BBC, & the NHS would not survive as the UK becomes a total economic basket case.

Vaccines have killed millions and caused the King’s cancer, women should be sent back to the Taliban, unis & schools forced to teach Reform’s ‘patriotic’ history, ‘burn them alive’ criminal given standing ovation. Wondering what unserious party looks like if that’s serious.

An incredible series of claims below. It’s important more people know just how far gone this movement is.

4 years ago Goodwin was calling what he now stands for fascism. He should be asked to explain why on every mainstream show he’s invited on.

How would history teachers be forced to teach a ‘patriotic’ curriculum? How would they be ‘trained’? Why would they want to minimise & bothsides slavery? Would they be sacked if they refused? Who would want to go into teaching facing these conditions & reject what they learned at uni?

How much would they have to pay tradespeople to leave their lucrative businesses & go into classrooms. How would they be trained to teach? Who would do it & pay for it? Why should certain children be channeled into trades? Which subjects would they drop? Does this mean secondary modern/grammars?

Interesting thread on a how a coterie of Dubai based millionaires want to bring their pro fossil fuel ethno nationalism to the UK via GBNews and a closer relationship with MAGA. If Reform were in power, Marshall et al. would end the BBC. He wants it defunded.

Something horrible is happening with no one in any position of influence or power even trying to do anything about it.

Is such ‘shitposting’ a consequence of liberal democracy’s principled pluralistic accommodation of ignorance & bigotry (which is leading to its downfall) and everyone feeling powerless to do anything about it? We’re still bothsidesing so many issues that passed the threshold a while back.

Populist epistemology: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Excellent overview - reflects one of the key tension of our times between populist epistemology & positivistic science. For impact, academics are incentivised to lean into populist epistemology. Even Haidt’s critics do this to an extent, calling for taxes on big tech that are never going to happen.

Completely gets social media - likely to cause huge problems for Labour as this will resonate with the young.

Imagine a Conservative or Reform government with a massive majority governing for the people who didn’t elect them.

My points for discussion at yesterday's event below. AI is adding to the sector's uncertainty and anxiety. It was great to see so many people turn-up for this event & many people had critical insights & questions. Thanks to Gavin, Sheena and Karen for organising. This conversation needs to continue!

On the plus side, X.com is a unique database of Britain's elite racists for social scientists & future historians to study (elite as in follower count, Musk endorsement & signal boost, mainstream media attention, ability to monetise racial grievance, & transgress & redefine norms).

Didn’t you call them chavs and yobs for 20 years until you realised you could ventriloquise your posh-boy racism through them?

Struck by how much right wing media discourse follows the domestic abuser’s logic - look what you’ve made us do - in a way that strips agency from people who commit violence. Traditional conservative personal responsibility no longer applies.

The right’s ‘cancel culture’ moral panic effectively neutralised liberalism’s ability to challenge racism by identifying it as a violation of social norms. Now the unsayable is said routinely to millions with no consequences. Unsurprisingly, the FSU’s Director is supporting ethnonationalism.

Yet, The Telegraph calls the discipline that has been highlighting and studying working class underachievement for 50 years - giving these answers - ‘cultural Marxist indoctrination’. Also, the Right seemingly believes in structural racism now - but only when it’s applied to people with white skin.

Each protagonist makes a rousing pre-battle speech on Senlac Hill that in reality about 15 men would’ve heard. Is Shakespeare responsible for this trope, or did it ever happen reality?

This is the guy who was convicted of assault - kicking his ex girlfriend outside a pub - before he was selected as a Reform candidate. If Reform had a few hundred MPs, how many people of this calibre would be in Parliament? M

Looking for some good reading about AI in education? Check out this new special issue "Theorizing the Future of Generative AI in Education" just out @lmt-journal.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjem20/5...

One of the best modern examples of how the far-right's ideology is sanitised. What an abject abuse of the term philosopher.

X is a porn site for racists now. If you know which accounts to look at it is easy to find stuff that's off the scale. Doing a study with something like NodeXL would be easy but I'd find it disturbing, I'd be trolled, doxxed, & would probably get death threats. Also, it would have no impact at all.

A lot could change in the next 4 years. However, currently there's little to suggest we aren't heading for a white ethnonationalist government run by racists, spivs and grifters who are less competent than even Liz Truss.

At least in the US, recent software engineering graduates have been betrayed by their predecessors who have engineered them out of a similar career.

For this event, I was going to talk about AI’s ability to accelerate the enshitification of education. But my working title is now AI in Age of Iatrogenic Politics i.e., like many other areas of public policy, AI in education could be the ‘cure’ that kills the patient.